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[Ed note: In observance of the US federal holiday which is observed on Monday October 11, 2021, I am inviting the editorial staff to run stories on a weekend schedule tomorrow. Please join me in thanking them for all their hard work and for the sacrifice of their spare time and energy! --martyb.]
Biden becomes first president to issue proclamation marking Indigenous Peoples' Day:
President Joe Biden issued a proclamation commemorating Indigenous Peoples' Day on Friday, becoming the first US president to do so, the White House said.
"The contributions that Indigenous peoples have made throughout history — in public service, entrepreneurship, scholarship, the arts, and countless other fields — are integral to our Nation, our culture, and our society," Biden wrote in the proclamation Friday. "Today, we acknowledge the significant sacrifices made by Native peoples to this country — and recognize their many ongoing contributions to our Nation."
Biden also marked a change of course from previous administrations in his proclamation marking Columbus Day, which honors the explorer Christopher Columbus. In that proclamation, the President acknowledged the death and destruction wrought on native communities after Columbus journeyed to North America in the late 1500s, ushering in an age of European exploration of the Western Hemisphere.
"Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past — that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them," Biden wrote.
More than 100 cities -- including Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco -- and a number of states -- including Minnesota, Alaska, Vermont and Oregon -- have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day, choosing instead to recognize the native populations that were displaced and decimated after Columbus and other European explorers reached the continent. Berkeley, California, was the first city to adopt Indigenous Peoples' Day, in 1992.
Also at Al Jazeera.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday October 11 2021, @08:07PM (3 children)
Yes, yes he did.
Estimates of the number of Taino people living on Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti today) when he arrived was around 2 million. Columbus arrived, and on day 1 noted the gold jewelry some of the welcome committee were wearing and said that he thought it would be really easy to take it from them by force. When it was time to leave, he stole some of their gold and kidnapped a few of them so that he'd have proof that he'd found something worth colonizing. On his subsequent trips back, he set up a permanent colony, and established an absolutely brutal regime that was, according to contemporary accounts by people like Bartolome de la Casas, cutting off their hands for failing to give the Spaniards gold (which mostly happened because the gold didn't exist on the island in the quantities the Spanish were demanding), raping the women and girls (Columbus himself wrote that he preferred them younger than age 13 both for his own use and because they got a better price on slave markets), and in some cases hunting them for sport. And Columbus as far as we can tell was proud of all of this.
It was brutal enough that within a couple of decades, there were no Taino left, and the Spanish monarchy had reacted to the news with "Whoa, dude! Not cool!" and stripped him of his titles and power.
One of my ancestors was part of that crew, and my mother has studied that early colonial history as part of some history work she did under an NEH grant.
The first thing to note here is that the Pilgrims had actually engaged in a borderline mutiny on board the Mayflower to redirect the ship from the Jamestown colony (where most of the people on board thought they were going) to where they landed.
Among the first things the Pilgrims did upon landing on Cape Cod was to go grave-robbing. They were for the most part middle-class tradespeople who had approximately zero clue how to build, fish, farm, or hunt, and they relied on robbing the Wampanoag early on for their food supply before Tesquantum (who you probably got taught about as "Squanto") showed up and saved their butts. And Tesquantum, so we're clear, understood and could speak English because he'd traveled across the Atlantic half a dozen times, sometimes in captivity and sometimes as a free man trying to get home to his family, and been to England during his travels as a free man.
And yes, the Wampanoag probably helped them survive because they needed help protecting themselves, but it wasn't the Iroquois that they were worried about, it was the Narragansetts and Pequots right on their borders in what's now Rhode Island and Connecticut. One of the first military encounters the Plymouth colony had was fighting with the Wampanoags against the Pequots and absolutely shocking the Wampanoags with their brutality. And once they were more established, the Plymouth colony started mistreating the Wampanoags to steal their land and just plain kill them off. So it's not surprising that when Massasoit died, his son Metacomet organized an attack on the now-much-larger Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies that wiped out almost half of their population.
So yeah, also not people to be proud of, really.
I'm of the mindset that genocide isn't OK, period. Because as soon as you say "but on the other hand ..." to a genocide, you're well on your way to saying "their genocides are bad, but our genocides are necessary and therefor justified for some greater good", which is exactly what genocidal monsters use to convince ordinary people to commit genocide.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 12 2021, @02:30PM (1 child)
Columbus showed up with 87 guys, and slaughtered 2 million Taino?
The Taino died because of diseases the Europeans brought. It worked out in the Europeans' favor, to be sure, but blaming Columbus for it doesn't make much sense because they had no idea how diseases worked then.
Being brutal, keeping slaves, rape, and all of those heinous acts were what everyone did to everyone in that day. Seen with modern eyes it's barbaric. Then, it was normal. All of those things, too, were practiced by natives across the Americas. So the idea that Columbus was worse than everyone else in the Americas is incorrect.
The Narragansetts and Pequots were being pressured by the Iroquois to their west [wikipedia.org]. The Iroquois were in an expansionistic phase, and were also exterminating the Neutrals and Hurons to their north and west.
The Wampanoags' strategy of making the Pilgrims allies worked in the short term. The colonists even dubbed Metacomet "King Philip." Long term, they turned on each other and the Wampanoags lost out.
I am of the same mindset. But the term genocide does not apply to European colonization of the New world, unless we're blurring the definition for rhetorical effect. And if you're calling European colonization of the Americas genocide, do you also call European colonization of Africa and South Asia genocide? Because the European colonizers did the same thing the same way wherever they went.
Columbus did not exterminate the peoples of the Americas. He did not exterminate the Taino either. Laying that at his door is incorrect. Disease was the culprit, and could have been the only culprit, because there is no other physical way for a few hundred or thousand colonists to wipe out tens of millions of Native Americans. The European colonists were not even as physically strong or as healthy as the natives they encountered because their diet and lifestyles were worse. And, no, a brace of muskets that are single shot and take a while to reload are not a magic wand to repel warriors adept with bows and atlatls (like de Soto found out).
It is tragic that the vibrant cultures of the Americas came off so badly with their encounters with European nations. Humanity lost a lot. But the narrative, the penchant, of describing the Native Americans as angels and Europeans as devils is inaccurate. History and reality are more complicated than that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 12 2021, @03:28PM
No, it wasn't normal, as evidenced by contemporary reactions to it.
There were numerous very intentional efforts to kill off or expel from a territory large groups of people based on ethnicity. Many cultures that once existed in the Americas no longer do, in large part because of that effort. If that's not genocide, neither is the Holocaust.
And I did not claim the people Columbus exterminated were angels. They were people, some holding political power.
And yes, disease absolutely played a role. And while the people of the 1500's and 1600's didn't know germ theory, they did notice that if they gave blankets to the Natives that had been used by people dying of smallpox, those Natives that used them died of smallpox, so they did quite a bit of that sort of thing as a very primitive form of biological warfare.
In addition to disease, Spanish policy, and later English policy, and later US and Canadian policy all played a role. About the only ones who can't be blamed too much were the French, who were more about trading with the people already in North America rather than taking their stuff, enslaving them, or killing them. And I don't consider it an accident that by the 1700's, most of the native peoples were allied with the French, not the English colonies.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 12 2021, @04:11PM
So, while I agree with almost everything you have said, I will put forth a small "it was the nature of the times" defense for some of what went on in colonial days. Columbus is no saint, he was point man for the winning team and history (written by the victors) has tried its best to whitewash his legacy. However, if it wasn't one colony ship full of brutal morons landing at Plymouth, it would have been another much the same, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse.
I feel this way most strongly about Hawaii and New Zealand. The indigenous people there were terribly abused, but it was nothing special or specific about the colonizers... In those cases I would argue that alternatives would mostly have been worse. Left uncolonized, another colonial power - less capable and therefore likely more brutal - would have invaded instead. Examples like Vietnam or many places in Africa where the colonizers were eventually expelled aren't exactly tales of sweetness and light.
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